With Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Powerset Labs, its clear that we are at the verge of a battle for the ‘search’ space. At the moment, there are a handful of startups which are targeting their technology offerings towards providing more relevance and ‘natural language semantics’ to search query and results. Yet, none of them have really managed to pick up steam, and they play on the fringes of experimentation at the moment. I can’t even remember the last time I relied on a search engine other than Google for my actual day-to-day needs (although, it once used to be altavisa and metacrawler).

Well, none apart from the massive Wikipedia, of course.

The strength of Wikipedia lies not only on its vast knowledge database, but its highly relevant structure. One of the most overlooked projects in the recent date, dbpedia.org, gives a glimpse into the possibilities it offers.

DBPedia reminds me of my old days of tinkering with AI (context-based systems). But now that the ‘world knowledge’ is being fed in a structured fashion by the ‘mob’, what are the systems that would evolve?